I love Wata, the Watcher. I like to refer to it in conversations. I like to use it in complex Marvel-themed analogies when arguments are won. I like to include it in articles, even though it gets edited a lot. Uatu is one of my favorite Marvel characters. I am Uatu 4 Life.
Now, when you play Marvel Snap, a collectible card game based on Marvel characters, you will know that there is a Uatu card. He is also interesting. Uatu comes with one cost, two powers, and when he’s in your deck, he gives you the right slot from the start so you can plan ahead a bit. Ouatu is one of the first cards that people usually get to play with, and it speaks in a cool voice when you use it, and the reveal effect is nice and dramatic. But there is a problem. He’s not a junk card, but in most cases, he’s a card you should probably fold pretty early on. There are better cards that do more useful things and give you more early game effect.
But here is my specific problem. As a huge fan of Ouatu, I’m never going to use it. And that means my deck has one less function slot than most people’s decks. Call it a fan tax: the spot is always reserved for Uatu, and so my other cards have to work around him.
I was discussing this with a friend this week after Eurogamer’s Katharine Castle published a great interview with Jake Solomon, formerly of Firaxis and the man behind Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Like Marvel Snap, Midnight Suns is another Marvel themed tactical game where you choose a bunch of your favorite heroes and engage in combat. There are maps in the game, but you have to consider placing the characters on 3D levels, not three different locations like in Marvel Snap. You also have a whole other half of the game where your characters share a house between missions and fights, watch TV, go for walks, and even start a book club.
It’s a great game, but the fan tax is at play again for me. I love Blade, and that means if I can take Blade on a mission, I will. And that’s regardless of whether he works well with the rest of the team or if he needs a level up or any of that.
Fan tax is less of an issue with Midnight Suns than with Marvel Snap. Firaxis does a number of things to make sure you use a wide variety of heroes, and it encourages you to invest your time in them in different ways. But I still lean towards Blade in a way that makes me neglect the other heroes more than I should. Just like I still find room for Uatu and a few other favorites in my deck when I can actually use more of my Marvel Snap cards.
But let’s turn it around. Maybe that’s not the problem. It is perhaps one of the greatest licenses in the world that makes these games more interesting. Both Marvel Snap and Midnight Suns get a lot from Marvel. Along with famous names and a wealth of knowledge, the heroes also guide the designers when it comes to thinking about powers and synergies, and even mission design in the case of Midnight Suns. Both games would be less colorful and potentially less creative without heroes that most players know about, but who still have characteristics that make the designer strain to create a tactical interpretation of them.
Speaking to Eurogamer a while back, Marvel Snap’s Ben Brode actually talked about it. He talked about how card designs are often either top-down or bottom-up, because the image is at the top and the text is usually at the bottom. A top-down approach starts with, say, Ouatu and says: What should the Ouatu map have? (It should FIX.) The bottom-up approach starts with the fact that we want to make more cards that clone other cards. How is it supposed to work and who might it work for?
I was particularly interested in what Brodet says about “top down”:
“But top-down movement really expands your brain,” he says in the piece. “How in… What would a hallucinating Mirage do? What would she do in this game? Or what would Mysterio do? When you think that way, you’re not thinking about mechanics, you’re thinking about fulfilling fantasy, and some of the craziest designs come from that.”
I suspect the fan tax works the same way. I use Marvel’s knowledge and ideas to – perhaps unintentionally – limit me as a player, and in tactical games, limitations are often really interesting because they force you to do new things, they force you to work around things, they force you to be creative that you wouldn’t normally were not. They make you think.
So now when I look back on Midnight Suns, I think about all the times I was able to pull off a win with Blade even though no one else would have taken it out that day. At Marvel Snap, I can look back on a long string of – admittedly a little weird – Watu wins, which are all the sweeter because they wouldn’t have unfolded the way they did if I were building a deck based on the head rather than the heart. I’ve always known that Marvel is very good for tactical games because its characters do certain things and have certain abilities and certain weaknesses and can be comboed and predicted and all the things you need for a tactical game. But now I realize there is more. They’re great for tactical games in part because we also love them in a way that means we favor one hero when we shouldn’t and ignore another hero when we really should. They force us to temporarily act against our own best interests for the sake of love – and that sounds pretty superheroic to me.